Parking pay boxes back in working order

UPDATE: A quick walking tour of the Loop this morning indicated parking boxes were in working order.

Despite repeated assurances that widespread problems were in the past, Chicago descended into yet another, new circle in its months-long parking hell Wednesday.

Some 250 newly installed pay-and-display parking boxes abruptly and inexplicably stopped working, providing fresh vexation across downtown for almost the entire workday and forcing officials to stop writing parking tickets as crews scurried to make repairs.

Just days ago, both City Hall and the company that took over Chicago's paid street parking system touted the new cash-or-credit boxes as the solution to lugging around baggies full of quarters for meters that often broke down.

Instead, the malfunctioning boxes were the latest in a chain of technological snafus since February, when Mayor Richard Daley's administration accepted a $1.15 billion payment to lease the parking system. Under the deal, street parking rates rose dramatically at all 36,000 spots, and the private operators received the right to collect all that money for 75 years.

Motorists who parked in the city's main business district Wednesday paid for their spots, only to find the new boxes would not print the receipts that must be displayed on the dashboards of their vehicles. Many boxes displayed an error message instructing parkers to "please pay at another station."

By mid-morning, police officers were telling frustrated drivers they had received orders to stop issuing parking tickets due to the problems with the boxes.

Still, the situation brought great confusion.

At one point, drivers had placed notes indicating that the boxes were not working in five of the 10 cars parked along a stretch of Ohio Street between Dearborn and Clark Streets. Each box covers between 10 and 12 parking spots.

Education consultant Anne Cox drove downtown from Naperville and tried to park on West Washington Street, only to find a group of people wondering why the boxes failed to issue receipts. Cox called a number listed on the box and was told that "all the boxes in this area are out." The operator told her she could park there for two hours for free. And she gave Cox a confirmation number that would help her get a parking ticket voided in case she was fined.